Free Larger Than Life (Novella) by Jodi Picoult Page B

on me. I start counting
     the steps. Fifty, and I will be okay. Forty-nine, until I close the door behind me.
     Forty-eight. Forty-seven.
    “Alice.”
    The sound of my name being called cracks the shell of my composure. I look up to find
     Grant waiting on the front steps of my hut. Seeing Lesego, he purses his lips. “She’s
     bounced back fast.”
    I nod, and he hands me a piece of paper. I hesitate, expecting another yellow slip
     from Western Union, but this is a piece of camp stationery with a name scrawled across
     it. “Who’s Karen Trendler?” I ask.
    “She runs a sanctuary in South Africa. She’s very active in the fight against poaching
     elephants and rhinos.” He hesitates. “Your girl isn’t ever going back to the bush,”
     Grant says. “I think you and I both know that.”

    I had expected my mother to come to the party Dr. Yunque threw for me at Harvard to
     wish me well as I left for South Africa, but she didn’t show up. I thought maybe she
     would call instead and wish me a bon voyage. Yet in the month that had passed since
     our fight in the lab, my mother had not reached out to me. Apparently, if I was going
     to ruinmy life, I was going to do it alone.
    I packed up my apartment in Cambridge without her help. I rented a storage unit instead
     of asking for space in her garage. And I tried to think like a scientist, not a daughter—making
     lists of all the times she had slighted me, all the things she had never said. Objectively—biologically—I
     knew I was an adult, that I could survive without her approval or attention. There
     was no reason she had to be part of my life, now that I was grown and independent.
     But love, you know, isn’t science. My mother was prickly, mercurial, maddening, demanding,
     infuriating—but she was still my mother. Somewhere behind the mask of dissatisfaction
     was the woman who had built a laboratory in my bedroom when I was seven. And so in
     one last-ditch attempt at reconciliation, the day before I flew to South Africa, I
     left my mother a voice mail, telling her what flight I was on, and when it was departing.
    I got to the airport early, lugging my one big suitcase to the ticket counter and
     checking in hours before my flight. But I didn’t go through the security checkpoint.
     I sat at a chair near the British Airways counter, scanning the features of every
     person who stepped through the sliding glass doors.
    Here was the great paradox that Darwin himself could not explain away: In spite of
     the fact that excising my mother’s negative influence from my life would probably
     make me happier, healthier, and therefore more evolutionarily viable, I couldn’t.
     True, my mother could make me feel smaller than a mustard seed; a single glance from
     her could make me question my every action and thought; and I could spend my entire
     life running and never catch up to her grand expectations for what I should have been
     or could have been—but she also had the power to make me feel like everything was
     going to work out, simply by breathing the words. She was a part of me, and if you
     carved away a part of yourself, you bled to death.
    I waited in the ticket lounge for British Airways until my name was called over the
     loudspeaker, a warning that the flight was going to leave without me.
    My mother did not come to say goodbye.

    In order to find Lesego a new home, I have to sneak out of the one we share. Grant
     has given me leave for a week to travel to Karin Trendler’s sanctuary to see if she
     will take the calf, and then to the necessary government departments to obtain the
     permits to make it happen. But Lesego cannot go with me, which means that the last
     person I have to encounter before leaving camp is Neo.
    He knocks on the door, and when I open it, I am careful not to make eye contact. “The
     bottle’s on the counter,” I instruct, as if I am giving orders to a nanny. “She was
     a little gassy last night, but I think it’s